World History

An essay by Paul Fussell explains the meaning of Spielberg's new film on war.

Charles W. Mills has, by his own estimation, located a crucial gap in Western political and ethical theory from the Enlightenment to Rawls and Nozick. Charles W. Mills has, by his own estimation, located a crucial gap in Western political and ethical theory from the Enlightenment to Rawls and Nozick. 

British Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized for doing "too little" in response to the Irish Potato Famine of the 19th century that killed one million people and brought about the emigration of millions more. But in fact, the English government was guilty of doing too much.

China is undergoing one of the great economic transformations in human history. It has moved from communism toward what it calls "market socialism" at breakneck pace, and enjoyed double-digit economic growth as a result.

The centralized, executive state makes corruption at the top a political inevitability.

The 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan provided another occasion for the media to celebrate the government's good works. The U.S.'s headlong plunge into global welfarism (nearly $100 billion in current dollars), they said, saved European economies after the Second World War. One reporter, Garrick Utley of NBC, even theorized that Marshall aid explains why East Germany was poor and West Germany rich.

Conor Cruise O'Brien lets the mask drop on of his deplorable new book.

"We Russians are doomed to teach mankind," wrote philosopher Grigory Chaadayev in 1848, "some awful lesson." The lesson turns out to be more than proving socialism's brutality and futility. It is also about the unlikelihood that elections alone will resolve a deep social and economic crisis.

When a people rebels and declares its independence, a central state can let them go or beat them into submission. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, we've seen some of both. In Chechnya, and adjacent Ingushetia, however, the Yeltsin government chose mass murder to maintain its evil empire.